Natural fresh cream and analogous synthetic creams which have been hitherto used as whipping cream and coffee cream, and for cheese, pudding, frozen dairy desserts such as ice cream and soft frozen dairy products, as well as in cooking, for example, in salad dressings and soup are in oil-in-water (O/W) emulsions. In general, cream containing about 38 to 47% of fat has been widely used as whipping creams, and cream containing about 20 to 40% of fat has been widely used for coffee creams, frozen dairy desserts and cooking. Recently, with an increase in general demand for dietary food, cream having a lower fat content has been requested. However, when a fat content of cream is merely reduced, there is such a defect that cream has less taste and lacks rich mouthfeel. Particularly, for whipping cream, a possible reduction of a fat content is at most to about 20% by weight, and such a reduced fat content makes whipping difficult and requires a long period of time to obtain a sufficient whipped state. Further, the whipped product obtained has rough texture and inferior decoration properties, and causes a reverse phenomenon (self reemulsifying phenomenon), which results in poor shape retention. Moreover, overrun thereof is too high and causes defects such as puffy mouthfeel and watery taste.
In order to remove these defects, an attempt to utilize a large amount of an emulsifying agent or a polysaccharide has heretofore been done. However, it does not succeed in production of cream having a low fat content in satisfactory quality.
On the other hand, recently, it has been permitted to use a polyglycerin fatty acid ester as an emulsifying agent for food. Then, many processes for production of cream having a low fat content have been proposed. For example, there have been proposed a process which comprises preparing an O/W emulsion from an oil phase formed by adding a lipophilic polyglycerin fatty acid ester to a fat or an oil, stirring the emulsion to cause phase reversal to form a water-in-oil (W/O) emulsion, adding the W/O emulsion to an aqueous phase, and then mixing and emulsifying the emulsion to form a double emulsified water-in-oil-in-water (W/O/W) emulsion to reduce the fat content to about 20 to 30% (Japanese Patent Kokai No. 59-62340); and a process for producing coffee cream or whipping cream having a reduced fat content which comprises directly preparing a W/O emulsion by using the above oil phase, mixing and emulsifying it with an aqueous phase to form a double emulsified W/O/W emulsion (Japanese Patent Kokai No. 60-16542 or 60-16546). In such a double emulsified emulsion, even if its actual fat content is as low as 20%, its apparent fat content is increased up to 40%. Thus, it is possible to obtain an emulsion in the same quality as that of a conventional whipping O/W emulsion having a fat content of 40% by using a double emulsified emulsion having a fat content of 20%.